The Impossible Amy Pond

Y'see, I'm back again? That month away was an aberration. One that's likely to be repeated from time to time, sure (as I said in my last post, it comes with the job). I've fallen behind though, my skills were atrophying while I was away, it was time to stretch some muscles. I never learn in some ways though, and the piece I'll be presenting today was a mistake. I pleasant and enlightening mistake to be sure (and how many of us would not be here today if it wasn't for pleasant and enlightening mistakes I wonder), but a mistake all the same. As usual I'll bore you all to death with a blow by blow account, but lets see the finished piece first shall we.

You can click it to enlarge to it's original size if you want.

I started out with a number of goals, and none of them was to produce a completed piece. My intention was to paint a bit, learn a bit and end up with something half way between a speedpaint and finished piece... I should back up and explain more. I wanted to challenge myself before eventually moving on to using real paints. One of the things I take for granted as a digital 'artist' is that I have an extremely wide palette (16,777,216 colours if memory serves), and I never need to mix paint - I just pick the colour I want and go. If I'm to make the switch to real media I'm going to need to learn about mixing colours, and that scares me a bit.

So I decided to see if I could produce a piece using a 'real' selection of paints, and mix all the colours I needed from there. By 'real' I mean my base colour selection would be taken from a set I long ago found online (I forget where, sorry) representing real paint colours by such and such manufacturer (I forget again which one - bah).  It's over on the left there if you're interested.  You may note a glaring omission if you open the image full size, but we'll get to that soon enough.

Every other colour I needed I would have to be mixed manually from those - which thankfully Art Rage allows you to do; although they don't have a separate palette window yet, for reasons that escape me, so it has to be done on the canvas. You'll see that a lot in the upper right corner of the following images.

So those were my initial goals.  I was going to create just a messy experimental piece more concerned with colour than anything else.  Spend an hour or so on it and call it a day.  I wanted to pick an image with an interesting colour palette though, or I'd just be slapping down any old thing and saying "oooh, pretty colours" and not learning anything from it.  Fortunate then that while I was Pondering what to paint I stumbled across this post on io9 (spoilers in there late to the party Who fans, so be warned).  That picture of Amy really jumped out at me, so I decided that would be what I'd work on.

Since I was intending for this to be rough and ready I didn't spend all that long  in preparation.  How many times have you heard me say that over the past 12 months?  Yep, every darn time.  Anyway, here are some images of the early stages.  I should warn you, they're bloody horrible (and enlargeable).

And really, that's all I'd planned to do, except that eye was pretty good.  Wouldn't hurt to do the other eye right?  And then that's pretty good, so may as well do the nose, and so on, and so on.  None of these things were brilliant, but they were good enough that I may as well see how the next bit turned out.  This went on until I got to the following stage, which was the tipping point (I've written about The Magic Line before - go read it, it's funny...  honest?).  So just changing the hairline made a world of difference (I'd spotted it as being way off long before, but didn't bother to fix it until this point).

After that I had to finish it.  I mean it's still not epic, which is probably understandable as even though it was based on the photograph I was still partly making it up as I went along.

Oh, and the colour that was missing from those 'paints'?  Black.  Seriously, there's no black - not even close to black.  I mean I almost never use pure black anyway, but the darkest colour there was miles off the mark.  I did my best to mix colours in such a way that they looked darker, but I couldn't really do any darker than this deep green I had.  It's the colour of her pupils and stuff.  Yes, I could have cheated and put black in there, but that would be missing half the point wouldn't it?  Oh, and another thing I didn't do was add layers underneath as I often do when painting digitally - everything had to go on top.  I could add new layers (A good way to simulate the paint drying - yeah, I was using 'wet' paint as well), but I couldn't put them under ones I already had in place.  So, the background was painted after the subject, which led to some difficulties around her hair. I couldn't erase either; except for my sketch lines, which I figured would be pencil, even though they were brown, and the palette paint, which in reality wouldn't have been on the canvas anyway.  I probably has some other arbitrary rules, but those were the main ones.

Oh, and don't get me started on painting the hair.  How do real painters manage?  Hair is really bloody hard at the best of times, but with no black, wet paints, no real idea how to mix 'ginger hair' colour and then having to paint around it...  It's bloody difficult!  Real artists are awesome!

Enough of me moaning about the ultimate ginger though, here's some more of the step by step, cropped in animated gif, or clickable for Big-image-o-ramA (TM) if you want to peruse at your own pace.

 

A few more notes before I trundle off.

• You can probably clearly see that the initial sketch is nowhere near the same as the final image. This is because I was correcting on the fly - you can see I have quite a bit of trouble getting her jaw-line right, especially on the left (her right). If I'd planned it out properly to begin with the final image would probably be a lot closer to the (cropped) source.  Then again, maybe it wouldn't be.
• I'm really pleased with how the leather on her jacket turned out - which is odd, because I hated it while I was working on it.  In the step-by-step it just magically appears, but I think I spent at least an hour on that alone.  The fir collar's OK too.
• The entire image looks sort of yellowish.  I think the main reason for this is having that green background, pushing everything toward green, and the very yellow/green base I came up with for her face in the initial couple of steps still shows through a little bit even in the final image
• I'm not happy with it...  but I do like it.  I'm not happy because if I'd known it was going to turn out half decently I would have spent longer on the prep, and hopefully that would have meant it would have resulted in an even better picture (I say this every. single. time).  But I do like it for itself - It's not the best likeness of Karen Gillian (who plays Amy Pond),    but it is quite an interesting portrait in its own right...  I think...  I'm too close to it - you decide and let me know (oh, who am I kidding? No-one ever comments, except 'anonymous', and that's usually my brother because he's forgotten his google account login).

Alright, if you read all that you deserve a treat.  here's the same image after I took it into Photoshop wondering how it would look if I did have a true black available and hadn't used such saturated colours to begin with (so it's more blue looking).  It's less true to the source photograph, but I do think it looks more dramatic, so here you go (click to enlarge.  Natch.).